A United States - Russia Nuclear War Would Leave 5 Billion Dead From Hunger 🚀

[Wagerallsports]

Nuclear war between US, Russia would leave 5 billion dead from hunger, study says​

Doyle Rice - USA Today

• "We must prevent a nuclear war from ever happening."
• About 75% of the world's population would die from hunger following a nuclear war.
• "No one has done this calculation before."

As many as 5 billion people worldwide – 75% of the global population – would die from famine and hunger after a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, a new study says.

The detonation of a nuclear weapon would cause massive fires and inject soot into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight from reaching the surface and limiting food production, leading to the deaths, the study said.


“A large percent of the people will be starving,” Lili Xia, a climate scientist at Rutgers University, who led the research, told Nature.com. “It’s really bad.”

Building on past research, scientists worked to calculate how much sun-blocking soot would enter the atmosphere from firestorms that would be ignited by the detonation of nuclear weapons.

"The reduced light, global cooling and likely trade restrictions after nuclear wars would be a global catastrophe for food security," the study said.

'We must prevent a nuclear war'​

“The data tells us one thing: We must prevent a nuclear war from ever happening,” said Alan Robock, a professor of climate science at Rutgers University and co-author of the study.

Any nuclear weapon detonation that produces more than 5 teragrams (5 trillion grams) of soot is predicted to likely cause mass food shortages in almost all countries, the study said.

"In the extreme scenario the death toll will be the combined population of the United States, Europe, Russian Federation and allies and much more," Deepak K. Ray told Newsweek magazine.

First-of-its-kind research​

The research is the first of its kind, according to the study authors.

"No one has done this calculation before," Robock told Health Day News. "No one has tried to calculate the numbers of people who would die."

The study authors estimate that famine-induced deaths arising from a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could be in the region of 2.5 billion in the two years following the outbreak of war; for a nuclear conflict between the U.S. and Russia, famine-related deaths could reach 5 billion.

Nuclear war might seem less of a threat than it did during the Cold War, according to Nature.com, but there are still nine countries with more than 12,000 nuclear warheads among them.

“If nuclear weapons exist, they can be used, and the world has come close to nuclear war several times,” Robock said. “Banning nuclear weapons is the only long-term solution."

Nuclear tensions between the U.S. and Russia have only escalated in recent months because of the ongoing Russian-Ukraine war. The threat of nuclear war seems especially relevant today as Russia’s war against Ukraine has disrupted global food supplies, according to the journal Nature, underscoring the far-reaching impacts of a regional conflict.

The study was published in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature Food.

 

[Wagerallsports]

If you survive the initial blast, this is what scientists think would happen after a nuclear attack​

Nicole Lin Chang

Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine and rising geopolitical tensions, revived fears of nuclear war have prompted many to question what a nuclear conflict would mean for humanity and the planet.

Any nuclear conflict would have a huge range of devastating consequences, from initial deaths in the direct blasts to the lingering effects of radiation and environmental pollution.

But immediate casualties could be dwarfed by deaths from a subsequent global famine, caused by massive amounts of soot blocking the Sun and disrupting climate systems and food production, according to new research published on Monday in the journal Nature Food.


Climate scientists at Rutgers University have mapped out the effects of six possible nuclear war scenarios.

A full-scale nuclear war between the US and Russia, the worst scenario modelled, could result in more than five billion people dying of hunger after two years. Even a relatively small-scale conflict between India and Pakistan could lead to worldwide famine.

Soot from explosions would disrupt climate​

In a nuclear war, bombs targeted at cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere which would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet, say the researchers.

This would disrupt the Earth’s climate, impacting food production systems on land and in the oceans.

The researchers used a climate forecasting tool to estimate the productivity of major crops on a country-by-country basis.

The ozone layer would be destroyed by the heating of the stratosphere, producing more ultraviolet radiation at the surface, and we need to understand that impact on food supplies.

Lili Xia
Professor, Rutgers University
They analysed what would happen in six possible nuclear conflict scenarios, each of which would result in different amounts of soot in the atmosphere, and could see temperatures fall between one and 16 degrees Celsius.

Even a relatively small-scale battle between India and Pakistan could result in crop yields declining by around 7 per cent within five years of the conflict.

Both countries possess nuclear arsenals of comparable size, and of the world's nine nuclear-armed countries, the two are also among the handful that has been increasing their nuclear warhead stockpiles, according to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).

Meanwhile, a full-scale nuclear war between the US and Russia, which are jointly estimated to account for 90 per cent of the world’s nuclear stockpile, could see production fall by around 90 per cent in the three to four years after the fighting.

'Listen to science'​

The researchers considered mitigating factors like using crops fed to livestock as human food, or reducing household food waste, but concluded that these sorts of interventions would not stop large parts of the world from experiencing famine, especially after larger-scale conflicts.

Crop declines would be most severe in the mid to high-latitude nations, including major exporting countries such as Russia and the United States, which could trigger export restrictions and cause severe disruptions in import-dependent countries in Africa and the Middle East.

"Future work will bring even more granularity to the crop models," said Lili Xia, lead author of the study and an assistant research professor in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University.

"For instance, the ozone layer would be destroyed by the heating of the stratosphere, producing more ultraviolet radiation at the surface, and we need to understand that impact on food supplies," she said.

"If nuclear weapons exist, they can be used, and the world has come close to nuclear war several times," said Alan Robock, the study’s co-author and a professor of climate science in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University.

"Banning nuclear weapons is the only long-term solution," he said. "The five-year-old UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been ratified by 66 nations, but none of the nine nuclear states".

"Our work makes clear that it is time for those nine states to listen to science and the rest of the world and sign this treaty".

 

[tommir99]

So according to this article 90% of the world's nuclear stockpile are in the US and Russia. Maybe United States could take the lead by example and destroy its nuclear weapons first? I wonder what this American professor Alan Robock thinks of that..

NATO keeps expanding towards Russia, and they want Russia to destroy its nuclear weapons

Not gonna happen (!)

 

[Wagerallsports]

So according to this article 90% of the world's nuclear stockpile are in the US and Russia. Maybe United States could take the lead by example and destroy its nuclear weapons first? I wonder what this American professor Alan Robock thinks of that..

NATO keeps expanding towards Russia, and they want Russia to destroy its nuclear weapons

Not gonna happen (!)

Yeah I can see the pointing fingers at each other but I think it's pretty realistic to say that the United States would keep their word and destroy them before Russia would

 

[Gary]

The best strategy is to always strike first.

 

[Wagerallsports]

The best strategy is to always strike first.

Cobra Kai Gary?

 

[Gary]

Cobra Kai Gary?

LOL